Critic Reviews

TV's best new drama. [27 Sept 2002]

Man, is this a good show...Boomtown is so good, it single-handedly restores your faith in broadcast networks. They can compete with the "freedom" of premium cable. All it takes is creative smarts. And NBC's Boomtown has plenty of those. [27 Sept 2002, p.B02]

HBO shows aside, visceral Boomtown is the new exemplar of quality TV dramas on Sunday night... Boomtown engrosses. It's the season's strongest new drama, not just because it takes a chance on a novel format, but because it manages to tell stand-alone stories even as it develops the characters in its large ensemble. [27 Sept 2002, p.40]

Graham Yost, who wrote HBO's "Band of Brothers," creates deeply drawn characters who are revealed slowly over the course of an episode (and season). He's the kind of writer whose vision and touch you can trust over the long haul.

While there is no shortage of narrative theorists who talk about detective fiction as being most successful when it is like a puzzle, no one on network television has ever managed to create a series that could make viewers feel as if they were actually putting together a puzzle piece by piece as they watched. Perhaps the nearest anyone came was the writing team of Richard Levinson and William Link with their pilot for Peter Falk's Columbo, but Boomtown is light years beyond what Levinson and Link were doing in the 1970s. [28 Sept 2002, p.1D]

Of a handful of promising new series this season, only one shows the promise of greatness: Boomtown.

It's messy and confusing, often complex and contradictory, and moves in fits and starts, sideways and backward. It's the most startlingly original program on television in years, maybe ever, and it's also one of the best. [28 Sept 2002, p.E1]

With Boomtown, you are likely to feel a much stronger emotional investment than with lesser crime dramas. In the final moments of the premiere, the drama reaches a level that is almost poetically tragic and terribly haunting...Ambitious, artful and sometimes ingenious, Boomtown is the best and least compromised new network drama series since "ER," and in its own way, just as much of a breakthrough. [28 Sept 2002, p.C01]

This requires some patience at first, although getting a handle on the format is relatively painless. Once that's accomplished, it's thrilling to watch Boomtown navigate twists and turns like a topflight Grand Prix racer. [29 Sept 2002, p.3]

The season's best new drama introduces a smart ensemble and immerses us in a tangle of conflicting viewpoints. The storytelling device, which occasionally backtracks in time, isn't distracting or forced. [29 Sept 2002, p.F-02]